After the plandemic plan did not have the desired effect, the Dark Forces have stepped up their efforts to increase End Time madness.The Jesuits, Knights of Malta and Knights of Columbus are now polarizing political left and political right in the Uni...
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Sayer Ji, Green Med InfoA concerning new study suggests that decades of medical procedures performed on infants without pain management has had deeply traumatizing effects.A groundbreaking study published in eLife titled, “fMRI reveals neural activity overlap between adult and infant pain,” demonstrates that the infant pain experience, despite long held assumptions to the contrary, closely resembles that of adults.Researchers discovered that when [...]
Julie Fidler, Natural SocietyCould it all be based on a myth?For years we’ve been told that depression is caused by low serotonin levels in the brain.Now, a leading professor of psychiatry is warning that belief is little more than a dangerous miscommunication, saying the marketing of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs is “based on a myth.”SSRI use began to skyrocket in the early 1990’s. The drugs were seen as a safer alternative to [...]
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| (Photo : NASA/ESA) In early days of solar system, Jupiter destroyed everything that came in its way, researchers have found. |
Excerpt from latimes.com
Before Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars occupied the inner solar system, there may have been a previous generation of planets that were bigger and more numerous – but were ultimately doomed by Jupiter, according to a new study.
If indeed the early solar system was crowded with so-called super-Earths, it would have looked a lot more like the planetary systems found elsewhere in the galaxy, scientists wrote Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As NASA’s Kepler space telescope has found more than 1,000 planets in orbit around other stars, along with more than 4,000 other objects that are believed to be planets but haven’t yet been confirmed. Kepler finds these planets by watching their host stars and registering tiny drops in their brightness – a sign that they are being ever-so-slightly darkened by a planet crossing in front of them.
In addition, ground-based telescopes have detected hundreds of exoplanets by measuring the wiggles of distant stars. Those stars wiggle thanks to the gravitational pull of orbiting planets, and the Doppler effect makes it possible to estimate the size of these planets.
The more planetary systems astronomers discovered, the more our own solar system looked like an oddball. Exoplanets – at least the ones big enough for us to see – tended to be bigger than Earth, with tight orbits that took them much closer to their host stars. In multi-planet systems, these orbits tended to be much closer together than they are in our solar system. For instance, the star known as Kepler-11 has six planets closer to it than Venus is to the sun.
Why does our solar system look so different? Astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin of Caltech and Greg Laughlin of UC Santa Cruz summed it up in one word: Jupiter.
Here’s what could have happened, according to their models:
In Solar System 1.0, the region closest to the sun was occupied by numerous planets with masses several times bigger than that of Earth. There were also planetesimals, “planetary building blocks” that formed within the first million years after the birth of the sun, Batygin and Laughlin wrote.
This is how things might have stayed if the young Jupiter had stayed put at its initial orbit, between 3 and 10 astronomical units away from the sun. (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance between the Earth and the sun. Today, Jupiter’s orbit ranges between 5 and 5.5 AUs from the sun.)
But Jupiter was restless, according to a scenario known as the “Grand Tack.” In this version of events, Jupiter was swept up by the currents of gas that surrounded the young sun and drifted toward the center of the solar system.
Jupiter, however, was too big to travel solo. All manner of smaller objects would have been dragged along too. With so many bodies in motion, there would have been a lot of crashes.
The result was “a collisional cascade that grinds down the planetesimal population to smaller sizes,” the astrophysicists wrote. For the most part, these planetary crumbs were swept toward the sun and ultimately destroyed, like disintegrating satellites falling back to Earth.
The planetesimals wouldn’t have been Jupiter’s only victims. Assuming the early solar system resembled the planetary systems spied by Kepler and other telescopes, there would have been “a similar population of first-generation planets,” the pair wrote. “If such planets formed, however, they were destroyed.”
Jupiter probably got about as close to the sun as Mars is today before reversing course, pulled away by the gravity of the newly formed Saturn. That would have ended the chaos in the inner solar system, allowing Earth and the other rocky planets to form from the debris that remained.
“This scenario provides a natural explanation for why the inner Solar System bears scant resemblance to the ubiquitous multi-planet systems” discovered by Kepler and other survey efforts, Batygin and Laughlin wrote.
Although their models show that this is what might have happened, they don’t prove that it actually did. But there may be a way to get closer to the truth.
The scientists’ equations suggest that if a star is orbited by a cluster of close-in planets, there won’t be a larger, farther-out planet in the same system. As astronomers find more exoplanetary systems, they can see whether this prediction holds up.
Also, if far-away solar systems are experiencing a similar series of events, telescopes ought to be able to detect the extra heat thrown off by all of the planetesimal collisions, they added.
Sadly for those hoping to find life on other planets, the pair’s calculations also imply that most Earth-sized planets are lacking in water and other essential compounds that can exist in liquid or solid form. As a result, they would be “uninhabitable,” they wrote.
Artist rendering of the system 30 Ari with its exoplanet and four stars. Excerpt from techtimes.com By Dianne Depra Researchers seeking to study the complexities of exoplanets with multiple stars have found a new system with four. Cal...
The background image in this composite shows the Hubble Space Telescope image of the region known as the Hubble Deep Field South. The boxes show distant galaxies that were invisible to Hubble.Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comAlong with Earthrise ...
Excerpt from latimes.com
Computers have beaten humans at chess and "Jeopardy!," and now they can master old Atari games such as "Space Invaders" or "Breakout" without knowing anything about their rules or strategies.
Playing Atari 2600 games from the 1980s may seem a bit "Back to the Future," but researchers with Google's DeepMind project say they have taken a small but crucial step toward a general learning machine that can mimic the way human brains learn from new experience.
Unlike the Watson and Deep Blue computers that beat "Jeopardy!" and chess champions with intensive programming specific to those games, the Deep-Q Network built its winning strategies from keystrokes up, through trial and error and constant reprocessing of feedback to find winning strategies.
“The ultimate goal is to build smart, general-purpose [learning] machines. We’re many decades off from doing that," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis, coauthor of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. "But I do think this is the first significant rung of the ladder that we’re on."
The Deep-Q Network computer, developed by the London-based Google DeepMind, played 49 old-school Atari games, scoring "at or better than human level," on 29 of them, according to the study.
The algorithm approach, based loosely on the architecture of human neural networks, could eventually be applied to any complex and multidimensional task requiring a series of decisions, according to the researchers.
The algorithms employed in this type of machine learning depart strongly from approaches that rely on a computer's ability to weigh stunning amounts of inputs and outcomes and choose programmed models to "explain" the data. Those approaches, known as supervised learning, required artful tailoring of algorithms around specific problems, such as a chess game.
The computer instead relies on random exploration of keystrokes bolstered by human-like reinforcement learning, where a reward essentially takes the place of such supervision.
“In supervised learning, there’s a teacher that says what the right answer was," said study coauthor David Silver. "In reinforcement learning, there is no teacher. No one says what the right action was, and the system needs to discover by trial and error what the correct action or sequence of actions was that led to the best possible desired outcome.”
The computer "learned" over the course of several weeks of training, in hundreds of trials, based only on the video pixels of the game -- the equivalent of a human looking at screens and manipulating a cursor without reading any instructions, according to the study.
Over the course of that training, the computer built up progressively more abstract representations of the data in ways similar to human neural networks, according to the study.
There was nothing about the learning algorithms, however, that was specific to Atari, or to video games for that matter, the researchers said.
The computer eventually figured out such insider gaming strategies as carving a tunnel through the bricks in "Breakout" to reach the back of the wall. And it found a few tricks that were unknown to the programmers, such as keeping a submarine hovering just below the surface of the ocean in "Seaquest."
The computer's limits, however, became evident in the games at which it failed, sometimes spectacularly. It was miserable at "Montezuma's Revenge," and performed nearly as poorly at "Ms. Pac-Man." That's because those games also require more sophisticated exploration, planning and complex route-finding, said coauthor Volodymyr Mnih.
And though the computer may be able to match the video-gaming proficiency of a 1980s teenager, its overall "intelligence" hardly reaches that of a pre-verbal toddler. It cannot build conceptual or abstract knowledge, doesn't find novel solutions and can get stuck trying to exploit its accumulated knowledge rather than abandoning it and resort to random exploration, as humans do.
“It’s mastering and understanding the construction of these games, but we wouldn’t say yet that it’s building conceptual knowledge, or abstract knowledge," said Hassabis.
The researchers chose the Atari 2600 platform in part because it offered an engineering sweet spot -- not too easy and not too hard. They plan to move into the 1990s, toward 3-D games involving complex environments, such as the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise. That milestone could come within five years, said Hassabis.
“With a few tweaks, it should be able to drive a real car,” Hassabis said.
DeepMind was formed in 2010 by Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, and received funding from Tesla Motors' Elon Musk and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others. It was purchased by Google last year, for a reported $650 million.
Hassabis, a chess prodigy and game designer, met Legg, an algorithm specialist, while studying at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College, London. Suleyman, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Oxford University, is a partner in Reos, a conflict-resolution consulting group.
Scholz's star - shown in this artist's impression - is currently 20 light-years away. But it once came much closerExcerpt from bbc.comAn alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered. No othe...
Excerpt from
thespacereporter.com
It may seem like something sourced directly from the fever dreams of Michael Bay, but it’s true. The star known as HIP 85605 is on a collision course with our solar system.
We need not worry, however. According to study conducted by Dr. Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, the binary star from the Hercules constellation will pass by our system at a distance of 0.04 parsecs.
Despite what Han Solo would have you believe, a parsec is a unit of distance and .04 parsecs translates to 8,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
If that is still too close for comfort, know that this astronomical drive-by won’t occur for at least another 240,000 years.
“Even though the galaxy contains very many stars the spaces between them are huge,” Bailor-Jones said. So even over the (long) life of our galaxy so far, the probability of any two stars have actually collided—as opposed to just coming close—is extremely small.”
The close encounter (on a universal scale, anyway) will be the first since a gas giant passed within 0.35-1.34 pc of our solar system over 3.8 million years ago, according to Bailor-Jones.
A drawing from the files at the French UFO departmentExcerpt from BBCBy Chris Bockman Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are willing to spend money investigating them - there is just one dedicated state-run tea...
Excerpt from
wsj.com By Andy Pasztor
Accident Sets Back Ambitious Timetables for Space Tourism and Other Commercial Ventures.
MOJAVE, Calif.—An improper co-pilot command preceded Friday’s in-flight breakup of Virgin Galactic LLC’s rocket, according to investigators, when movable tail surfaces deployed prematurely.
Two seconds after the surfaces moved—with SpaceShip Two traveling faster than the speed of sound—“we saw disintegration” of the 60-foot-long experimental craft, according to Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The co-pilot died in the accident, and the other pilot was severely injured.
The sequence of events released by the NTSB indicates that the rocket ship separated normally from its carrier and the propulsion system worked normally until the tail surfaces, called feathers, deployed.
The disaster, coupled with the explosion earlier last week of an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. cargo rocket destined for the international space station, has set back the ambitious timetables embraced by space-tourism proponents and other commercial ventures seeking to get beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Some in the industry predict difficulties obtaining additional private-equity funding for startup ventures, while others worry about nagging propulsion problems and public confidence.
“Recent events bring home the reality that we’re in a very dangerous phase” of pursuing space activities relying on the private sector, said Howard McCurdy, a space history expert at American University. Launching rockets and vehicles “is always a very risky business,” he said, and no amount of ground tests “can duplicate the aerodynamic stresses and other conditions” of actual space flight.
Virgin Galactic had initially hoped to start commercial service by 2008, but persistent development and testing challenges have repeatedly pushed back the date. Before the accident, company officials were talking about inaugurating service by early 2015, with company founder Sir Richard Branson and members of his family slated to take the first ride. Now, the initial launch date is uncertain because the probe is likely to stretch for many months.
How much the fledgling industry is set back may depend on what investigators determine caused the two accidents. Some industry officials and analysts predict that Virgin Galactic’s fatal mishap may have a long-term residual impact as dramatic as the fallout from the 2003 in-flight breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, which killed all seven crew members.
“It’s clearly bad news for commercial space,” said one veteran industry official affiliated with another commercial space company. “But from the beginning, people recognized a fatal event on some spacecraft was inevitable.”
Earlier Sunday, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive, defended the company’s safety procedures and indicated that the rocket motor on the craft that crashed was a derivative of a design that had been successfully tested on the ground and in the air for years.
“At the end of the day, safety of our system is paramount,” he said in an interview. “The engineers and the flight-test team have the final authority” to determine when and how experimental flights are conducted.
Virgin Galactic has pledged to cooperate fully with the probe, which also includes experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp. unit that designed and is testing the Virgin crafts—SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft, dubbed WhiteKnight Two. The pilots on Friday’s test flight were Scaled Composites employees.
Mr. Whitesides, a former senior NASA official, is in charge of the roughly $500 million project intended to take passengers on suborbital flights for more than $200,000 each. He said last week’s test flight wasn’t rushed. “I strongly reject any assertion that something pushed us to fly when we weren’t ready,” he said.
SpaceShip Two’s fuel tanks and engine were recovered largely intact. The hybrid motor fueled by nitrous oxide and a plastic-based compound was found some 5 miles from where large sections of the tail first hit the ground. Sections of the fuselage, fuel tanks and cockpit were located some distance from the engine itself.
The condition and location of various pieces of the wreckage suggest there was no propulsion-system explosion before the craft started coming apart miles above California’s Mojave Desert, according to air-safety experts who have reviewed the images.
“It’s hard to figure how an engine explosion” could produce such a debris field, said John Cox, an industry consultant and former accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association.
The rocket ship was equipped with six onboard video cameras and many sensors feeding data to the ground. The flight also was followed by radar, and was filmed from the ground and by a plane flying close by.
SpaceShip Two’s rocket motor received considerable attention immediately after the accident. Industry officials and news reports concentrated on the fact that it was burning a new type of plastic-based fuel for the first time in flight.
The new engine-fuel combination was tested on the ground about a dozen times in the months leading up to Friday’s flight.
Two seconds after the surfaces moved—with SpaceShip Two traveling faster than the speed of sound—“we saw disintegration” of the 60-foot-long experimental craft, according to Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The co-pilot died in the accident, and the other pilot was severely injured.
The sequence of events released by the NTSB indicates that the rocket ship separated normally from its carrier and the propulsion system worked normally until the tail surfaces, called feathers, deployed.
The disaster, coupled with the explosion earlier last week of an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. cargo rocket destined for the international space station, has set back the ambitious timetables embraced by space-tourism proponents and other commercial ventures seeking to get beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Some in the industry predict difficulties obtaining additional private-equity funding for startup ventures, while others worry about nagging propulsion problems and public confidence.
“Recent events bring home the reality that we’re in a very dangerous phase” of pursuing space activities relying on the private sector, said Howard McCurdy, a space history expert at American University. Launching rockets and vehicles “is always a very risky business,” he said, and no amount of ground tests “can duplicate the aerodynamic stresses and other conditions” of actual space flight.
Virgin Galactic had initially hoped to start commercial service by 2008, but persistent development and testing challenges have repeatedly pushed back the date. Before the accident, company officials were talking about inaugurating service by early 2015, with company founder Sir Richard Branson and members of his family slated to take the first ride. Now, the initial launch date is uncertain because the probe is likely to stretch for many months.
How much the fledgling industry is set back may depend on what investigators determine caused the two accidents. Some industry officials and analysts predict that Virgin Galactic’s fatal mishap may have a long-term residual impact as dramatic as the fallout from the 2003 in-flight breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, which killed all seven crew members.
“It’s clearly bad news for commercial space,” said one veteran industry official affiliated with another commercial space company. “But from the beginning, people recognized a fatal event on some spacecraft was inevitable.”
Earlier Sunday, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive, defended the company’s safety procedures and indicated that the rocket motor on the craft that crashed was a derivative of a design that had been successfully tested on the ground and in the air for years.
“At the end of the day, safety of our system is paramount,” he said in an interview. “The engineers and the flight-test team have the final authority” to determine when and how experimental flights are conducted.
Virgin Galactic has pledged to cooperate fully with the probe, which also includes experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp. unit that designed and is testing the Virgin crafts—SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft, dubbed WhiteKnight Two. The pilots on Friday’s test flight were Scaled Composites employees.
Mr. Whitesides, a former senior NASA official, is in charge of the roughly $500 million project intended to take passengers on suborbital flights for more than $200,000 each. He said last week’s test flight wasn’t rushed. “I strongly reject any assertion that something pushed us to fly when we weren’t ready,” he said.
SpaceShip Two’s fuel tanks and engine were recovered largely intact. The hybrid motor fueled by nitrous oxide and a plastic-based compound was found some 5 miles from where large sections of the tail first hit the ground. Sections of the fuselage, fuel tanks and cockpit were located some distance from the engine itself.
The condition and location of various pieces of the wreckage suggest there was no propulsion-system explosion before the craft started coming apart miles above California’s Mojave Desert, according to air-safety experts who have reviewed the images.
“It’s hard to figure how an engine explosion” could produce such a debris field, said John Cox, an industry consultant and former accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association.
The rocket ship was equipped with six onboard video cameras and many sensors feeding data to the ground. The flight also was followed by radar, and was filmed from the ground and by a plane flying close by.
SpaceShip Two’s rocket motor received considerable attention immediately after the accident. Industry officials and news reports concentrated on the fact that it was burning a new type of plastic-based fuel for the first time in flight.
The new engine-fuel combination was tested on the ground about a dozen times in the months leading up to Friday’s flight.
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| Honda’s Walking Assist with Stride Management: Coming to a Hospital Near You! |
If, that is, you’re connected to one of 50 Japanese medical institutions now testing and evaluating a pair of the semi-robotic exoskeletal assistive devices. Honda breaks down the what’s-it-do-and-how as follows:
“The [Walking Assist Device’s] control computer activates motors based on information obtained from hip angle sensors while walking to improve the symmetry of the timing of each leg lifting from the ground and extending forward, and to promote a longer stride for an easier walk.”
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| Shoppers utilizing Rascals at Wal-Mart |
Honda’s worked closely with several medical institutions throughout development of the Walking Assist Device, but last week’s announcement of the 100-unit roll-out signals what is effectively their flagship field testing effort; a medical trial to collect feedback and evaluations from professionals and patients, and data from the devices themselves, of course. But it’s much sexier than your average medical trial. Because robots. Obviously.
Each rehabilitation and/or physical therapy-focused recipient medical facility gets one medium- and one large-sized device. Details on the cost and duration of the leases haven’t been disclosed, but we do have the following specs:
If successful, the devices will very likely see wider domestic trials, possibly moving beyond rehabilitation and making their way into the homes of Japan’s rapidly aging population. In addition to recovery, the Walking Assist Device could provide just the boost needed for walking to the grocery store, visiting a friend or family member, a healthy stroll around the shopping center, or, for Japan’s endangered farming population, 50% of whom are within 5-10 years of retirement, another trip out to the field.
Given sufficient demand, and should they be cheap enough to produce, the Walking Assist Devices could perhaps be enlarged for populations a bit more… uhhh, let’s be nice and say “a bit more robust.” Among other developed nations, the U.S. also has a growing population of retirees who’d definitely appreciate the extra spring in their step. But Honda, remember, you’re going to need some bigger springs. Sorry about that. It’s a problem. Sorry.
Honda’s Ongoing Assistive Robotics Commitment – Respect Due:
While Honda began specific work on walking-assist devices in 1999, the devices weren’t widely public until 2009. Differences between the current and early iterations are visible in the main image above: on the right and left are the earlier, bulkier, more metallic devices – the middle image, included in last week’s press release, shows the sleeker, current model (the middle image has actually been out in the wild for at least a year, so one assumes the 50 medium and 50 large devices now shipping are the same, possibly with some under-the-hood upgrades and/or modifications).
Unless you’re of a certain level of robo-dorkiness, you might not know that Honda’s actually been pounding away on bipedal humanoid robotics tech since the mid-1980s. You might be unaware of their proactive efforts toward addressing Japan’s aging population crisis through assistive robotics (Akihabara News coverage). And, you could have missed news that Honda’s pursuing a robotics-in-the-home partnership with Sekisui House (even more Akihabara News coverage!).*
Cars, ATVs, a lawnmower perhaps, maybe a sprinkling of ASIMO – that’s the standard mental image of Honda.
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